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Commentaryism... No, AnComs, Wage Labour Ain't a Form of Violence...

A conversation in which somebody explains very neatly why the AnCom critique of voluntary, contractual wage labour is a non-starter, and no talk of theories of value was necessary!

In the Red and Black corner we have Cipher, and in the Yellow and Black corner, V!

Cipher

Market contracts are not voluntary. That's an insane dichotomy. An ultimatum between starvation and a corporate tithe is not a choice. Don't paint it as such, it's f****** asinine. It discredits an already ridiculous philosophy. Anarcho capitalism is just re-bagged laissez-faire capitalism. There's nothing original about it.

Ⓥ

Who's forcing you to enter contracts? You either work, receive charity or starve under any anarchic system.

Sustenance is a biological prerequisite for survival, seems to me you're equivocating it with "force".

Cipher

A system with only contracts is not voluntary. It's orwellian doublespeak.
Slaves also had the lovely "voluntary" choice of obeying their masters or being beaten within an inch of their lives as human chattel.

There are no real meaningful choices here, only ultimatums.

Ⓥ

I shall elaborate since it seems you didn't answer my question or understand what I meant by equivocation. Force is an interpersonal dynamic. The fundamental attributes of human existence cannot accurately be characterized as 'force'.

E.g., to survive, one must eat. Eating is thus a requirement of existence. But this is not what it means to be forced to eat.

Being forced to eat would mean, e.g., a person physically putting food into your mouth against your will or threatening to harm you, if you did not eat.

Sustenance is thus a prerequisite of the entire concept of voluntary action vs. forced action. Everyone who has declined or failed sustenance is dead.

Consequently, the requirement of sustenance is part of the very definition of a group of people we are talking about when discussing force. "Humans are forced to survive" is an incoherent proposition. Forced by whom or by what?

The answer is: by their own existence and nothing else. Every human actively self-imposes this requirement or declines or fails it and dies.

Just because you cannot decline labor for survival, doesn't mean you cannot decline, accept or terminate contracts with other individuals on mutual terms. Indeed, one could hypothetically live a completely contractless life.

I've only found anti-capitalist folks use 'force' in this way. Others mostly apply it to interactions between moral agents. What are your thoughts?

Have you ever received any other noteworthy responses to this argument?

See? Is it starting to get through one's layers of cognitive dissonance yet? There is no human agency in creating the unpleasant situation that we call poverty or the solution to that problem which we call wage labour!

If there is no human agency, then there is no moral dimension and any critique claiming one is now exposed as completely false.

EDIT; in case nobody believes that the quotes above are real, here they are in context;

Do read the links in the order in which they appear please. Finding the right comments in the third link might be quite interesting. They are all by a user called BestTrousers and start with "RI" meaning R1.

The main argument used by HealthcareEconomist3 is to give a survey of several works, while BestTrousers goes for comparative advantage.

Hopefully you good folks can indulge me by forgiving this post. It is an unfinished mess because I wanted it out there as the anchor for a hyperlink from a Reddit thread.At the momebt everything below is a jumble of notes, but I will be reworking it bit by bit starting today.Hopefully this post will be sorted out and typed in full before the end of April 2017.

~~~

Historical materialism is the idea that history progresses in stages - slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism, then communism - driven by changes in the technologies or techniques of production, and that any human civilisation will exemplify this process.

This makes historical materialism an exercise in both historicism and materialism.

Historicism is the idea that studying the past can reveal history's in-built course or narrative, and so show you the future.

Materialism is the idea that ideas ( and institutions) ultimately* don't matter in determining our destinies, and that therefore only material…

The idea that labor exploits capital is equally as plausible, sans assumptions*, as the idea that capital exploits labor. This is only intended as a response to the formal concept, descriptive or normative, of exploitation in Marx's schema from Capital Volume I.

* Assumptions include the power relation whereby capital is just assumed to be above labor hierarchically.

~ ~ Capital exploits labor because...
... Capital earns income from production done by labor that capital didn't perform
& ~ Labor exploits Capital because...
... Labor earns income from capital that labor didn't buy~
Basically in good old formal logic fashion both of those cases above, being factual descriptions, are true at once or are false at once.